The loss of my own German passport was not the result of ideology or historical injustice, and not in the least bit noble or tragic. First, I couldn’t find my naturalization certificate, which I may not have even received in the mail. And then I lost my passport.

Germany’s logic is that my passport is an effort to restore bonds broken by history. Somewhere in a bureaucratic office in Cologne is proof that, as a direct descendant of someone denied their citizenship during the Third Reich for religious or political or ethnic reasons, I am legally German. The country has mostly moved away from its tradition of citizenship based on jus sanguinis, the right of blood—a rationale still present in the state of Israel, where I was born—but my passport, even in limbo, is a lingering legacy of that policy.

Very few other proofs of my German-ness still exist. On a recent trip, I saw early 20th-century graves, smothered with ivy, in Berlin’s Weissensee cemetery, marking the lives of those who died without knowledge of how their resting place would turn on their children. We have addresses for homes that have long since been destroyed.

There is also a 1937 letter, recently translated, in which a cousin, Curt Plonsker, writes to another relative that “until the year 1932, [I] did not consider it as my misfortune to be Jewish and surely I would not feel that way today, if I could live outside my Fatherland.” A veteran, like my great-grandfather, of World War I, he writes that he “loved my Fatherland as I still do today, however, it is an unhappy love of mine, for as you, dear Mrs. Plonsker know, as a Jew I am defamed and dishonored, having to live in these times with the deepest resignation, and I am painfully sad that I could not have died in the battlefield.”

Apart from that, I am hardly alone in knowing more about how the people who lived in those homes died than how they lived. We know that my great-grandmother Ilse was unable to convince her parents to stay in Palestine when they visited her there in 1936; Siegfried and Jenny were more worried about Arab uprisings than about Hitler. We have precise details of how they were murdered: They were taken on one of those trains that had been Siegfried’s livelihood as an employee of the national railroad, leaving on Track 3 from the city of Kassel’s train station, first to Theresienstadt on Sept. 7, 1942 and then to Treblinka on Oct. 29 of the same year. We can thank the bureaucracy of genocide for giving us images of the hand-lettered ticket and car number.

Thanks to the same country’s meticulous rites of remembrance, Siegfried and Jenny have another type of grave, more proof made of stone. About 20 years ago, Kassel-born artist Horst Hoheisel began asking schoolchildren to research the lives and deaths of Kassel’s murdered Jews. Each life was described in longhand on notepaper and wrapped around a stone—much like the stones Jews place on graves in memoriam. The stones were stacked and placed under glass at the station, steps from the deportation point. When I visited that station with my mother nearly 60 years later, we could glimpse a hand-scrawled “Siegfried” on a paper wrapped around one of the rocks.

Hoheisel is most famous for suggesting that the Brandenburg Gate be blown up in memorial to the murdered Jews. In Eberswalde, Germany, he recently told the Jewish journal Habitus, he proposed a memorial to a burned synagogue, which caught fire during a storm in 1936: “All of the people in the town helped put out the fire. Two years later, the same people destroyed the synagogue.” Hoheisel’s idea of a three-meter wall, doorless and windowless, sparked outrage. “I tell them, ‘You destroyed a holy place here. It can’t come back.’ There are no Jews left in this town.”

***

There are, in fact, plenty of Jews now elsewhere in Germany, many of them Israelis, so during my last visit I had to convince the gate agent in Israel that I had no intention of staying in Germany despite a one-way ticket, showing her another leg to the United States. “But I could stay if I wanted to,” I mumbled uselessly. What with my disappeared passport, itself already expired, and not nearly enough German to handle getting a new one, I entered with my American and Israeli passports, without the pretense of belonging.

Germany still mostly frowns on dual or multiple citizenship, a debate relevant to the 1.6 million Turkish citizens living in the country; the Aussiedler, ethnic Germans of the Eastern bloc, have to prove their language skills to “return.” My only claim to Germanness, aside from that blood right—and lives and slaughters four generations removed—is my near-daily listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

It is also a rite of remembrance for my grandmother Rachel, whose homes were always filled with Bach. She was born in the place that became Israel, which by the time she was a teenager stamped its first passports to say they were valid anywhere but her parents’ country of birth. After the eventual opening of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, a man in Germany teased her for asking what the local coins were called. “You’ve been away from your homeland too long!” he had said, unable to hear foreignness in her German. It was her first visit.

The rest of her life was lived, joyously, in Hebrew, the language she taught to the Moroccan immigrant who would become my grandfather, when he, too, forswore everything that came before. After the war, her parents refused to visit Germany—in fact, they never went anywhere else again. “If I had wanted to be there,” said my great-grandfather Josef, known for gently sardonic aphorisms, “I would not be here.”

They were never afflicted with that chronic Jewish condition of the time, pre- and postwar refugee status. More typical was what Auden described in “Refugee Blues”: “The consul banged the table and said/ ‘If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead’/ But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.”

Continue reading: My German passport

I had also chosen to reclaim my German citizenship under a law designed to restore the rights of families who fled Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945. I was confident that my legal right to citizenship, paired with my taste for German food, language, and culture, would ease my integration into German society. I wasn’t looking to shed my American identity, but rather to give life to a dormant part of myself.

Days before I officially became a German citizen, authorities discovered a neo-Nazi terror cell that is allegedly responsible for the murder of at least 10 people over the past decade. The message seemed clear: The land that my German Jewish parents escaped in 1938 is still not safe; it is blighted by underground networks of violent, brown-shirted skinheads who easily evade detection by government officials. In my eagerness to teach our kids about their roots, did I overlook the risks of our German Jewish adventure?

***

On most days, we weave ourselves into the fabric of Berlin with ease. We belong to Ohel Hachidusch, a Renewal congregation where members radiate a deep sense of pride in carrying on the tradition of Jewish life in Germany. Our oldest son recently became a bar mitzvah in Berlin’s former Jewish orphanage—the first from our family to experience this rite of passage on German soil since the Holocaust. We take advantage of Berlin’s abundant Jewish cultural offerings and savor the great bagels, spreads, and falafel that surpass what is available in our hometown of Bozeman, Mont.

And Berlin is far from Zwickau, the East German city that was home base for the three core members of the neo-Nazi gang who called themselves the National Socialist Underground. In addition to the murder of nine men of Turkish and Greek origin and a German policewoman, the Zwickau terror cell is believed to be responsible for a number of bombings and bank robberies.

But even if the staging grounds for most skinhead groups are far from our city, neo-Nazis have a visible presence here too. Last fall, the far-right National Democratic Party plastered the city streets with campaign posters that sent chills down our spines. The most horrific of which showed Udo Voigt, the party leader at the time, revving up a motorcycle alongside the slogan “Gas Geben”: Step on the Gas. Another poster showed a caricature of three ethnic minorities sitting on a flying carpet with the slogan “Guten Heimflug,” or Have a Good Flight Home.

And daily life brings regular encounters with the Holocaust. We tread on death each day as we stumble across some of the 2,950 stolpersteine in Berlin. These brass stumbling stones are mini memorials that are placed in the ground in front of the former homes of Holocaust victims. Gathering in a football huddle, the five of us stop to read each of these testimonials to lost life when we come across them on family outings. Our children learned the words ermordet, murdered, deportiert, deported, and verhaftet, arrested, long before they learned many other everyday German phrases.

As we hurry to catch the U-Bahn or S-Bahn we often come face-to-face with a plaque or memorial to the victims who were deported from our specific location. We’ve toured the Topography of Terror, Holocaust Memorial, Jewish Museum, special exhibits about Hitler, forced labor camps, and more.

We’re so saturated in reminders of this country’s evil past that we sometimes pine for America—the land of tomorrow.

With all of Germany’s impressive efforts to confront the legacy of the Holocaust, one would expect government officials to show extra sensitivity toward families who seek to reclaim part of what they lost under the Third Reich. But this has not been my experience. Perhaps it’s just that the German habit is not to smile or display any warmth when conducting business. My fully documented citizenship application was first lost, then ignored, and finally subjected to last-minute demands for further proof of my ancestry. I spent months wrangling with bureaucrats whose answers to my inquiries seemed designed to intimidate. “They are just hoping you will go away,” said some of my German Jewish friends.

Even ordinary Germans seem to enjoy wielding authority over others. Many seem to take great delight in alerting us to our daily transgressions. We’ve been scolded for petting people’s dogs, making too much noise while recycling, breaking various subway rules, and so on. I’m not used to getting behavior lectures from adults, especially when they seem so eager to put us in our place. These encounters leave me disturbed by the German propensity to follow authority rather than question it.

I feel accepted here, but how welcome am I really? I’m sure some Germans feel I don’t belong here, and that could be true. But that decision will be mine, not theirs. I am now both an American and a German citizen, with many possibilities for where to live and work. The opportunities for my children, who have also become German citizens, are even greater.

Every day I ride the trains of Berlin, stare at my fellow passengers, listen to their conversations, and wonder. I wonder if they are a mirror image of me or a descendant of those who persecuted anyone who was not a pure Aryan. This is the paradox of being a German Jew, to share the ethnic heritage of a people who committed genocide, but to also belong to one of the groups that was the target of this genocide. This paradox haunts my time in Germany but does not deter me from staying here a little longer.

His partner at the piano, the composer Thomas Adès, provided more than accompaniment. Schumann’s selection of 16 poems from Heine’s “Lyric Intermezzo,” the Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love) Op. 48, gives the piano an unusually independent voice, including several extended postludes. Adès exercises a preternatural degree of control at the keyboard—his pianissimo trills sound like a muffled electric bell—and he switched seamlessly between restrained backing for Bostridge and boisterous renderings of the piano music.

Heine converted to Christianity in his youth but returned to Judaism on his death bed, where he wrote a handful of last, deeply religious poems. He remained conflicted until his death between the blandishments of secular culture and Jewish faith. Schubert and Schumann set his early love poetry, with its aching sense of loss and anti-Romantic self-awareness. Not until much later was Heine identified with the 12th-century Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi, whose love was “the very picture of destruction, and her name was Jerusalem.” Still, Heine’s early poems belong to the cultural treasure-chest of the Jewish people. The attraction and repulsion of earthly love in Heine’s verse betray the sense of the sacred that emerged in his deathbed poems. And the settings of great composers offer the easiest point of access now that Jews have parted company with the German language.

Bostridge’s voice is pretty rather than powerful, strongest in the head voice, and sometimes strained in lower registers. He has a disconcerting habit of starting vibrato a moment after starting a note. Many operatic tenors—one thinks of the late Fritz Wunderlich—brought a more beautiful sound to this repertoire.  All his vocal sins are forgiven, though, for his service to poet and composer.

Bostridge and Adès were at their best in songs like the Dichterliebe’s No. 14, in which the poet recounts a recurring dream about his lost love: She gives him a cypress branch and whispers a soft word to him, and then, “I wake up, the branch is gone, and I’ve forgotten the word.” To convey the somnambulant character of the narrative, Schumann keeps the meter eerily off-beat, so that the last line tumbles out too quickly, enhancing Heine’s punch line.

Not all of the Dichterliebe came off so well. No. 9 is a ghastly waltz, in which the poet lurks outside his beloved’s wedding party, listening to the dance music. “There’s a flute, a violin, and trumpets … and in between, the lovely little angels sob and groan,” the poet sneers. Inexplicably, Bostridge chose a tempo so fast that even the masterful Adès could not find many of the bass notes. (For Vladimir Horowitz’s version, see here at minute 1:25.)

And in the penultimate song, which tells of a fairy-tale land, Adès ignored Schumann’s repeated emphasis on the wrong beats, which so effectively convey the weirdness of the vision. To Heine’s complaint that “when the morning sun arrives, it all dissolves into foam,” Schumann evokes the popping of a bubble; and the popping bubble at the end of the song sets up the grand appoggiatura that announces the final number, a funeral march for the poet’s illusions.

Bostridge’s choice of an exceptionally fast tempo in the final song also was puzzling.  The verse is a dead-march that evokes giants carrying an enormous coffin to the sea, where the poet will bury his love and pain—not a quick-step. The overlap between the final measures of the preceding song and the opening of the last number also indicates a moderate pace. Bostridge had chosen a better tempo in an earlier performance.

These are small complaints, though, about a performance that for the most part displayed intelligence and attention to detail. The second half of the program included the seven Heine songs Schubert composed in the last year of his life, from the posthumously published Schwanengesang, or “Swan Song,” collection. Here Bostridge was entirely at home and convincing in all respects.

The evening opened with a curious self-indulgence: Bostridge performed a song by the English Renaissance composer John Dowland, and Adès followed with a solo composition—as the program notes explained, they were “exploding” Dowland’s music. It is the sort of work, to paraphrase Rossini, that one can’t appreciate at first hearing but isn’t likely to listen to twice.

• Items from the 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann will soon be on display at the Israeli parliament. [Washington Post]

• “Hello, it’s the Jew,” and other Barney Frank quotes. [NYT]

• At a New York City fundraiser last night, President Obama said the administration had done more to protect Israel than any previous administration has. Here’s what else he said. [White House]

• A Nazi-era bunker in Hamburg, Germany is being turned into an eco-friendly energy hub that will provide electricity for 3,000 homes. [Green Source]

• Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is not at all happy with President Obama after the administration publicly opposed legislation that would sanction Iran. [YouTube]

“At the beginning of this century there were people called Wagnerians,” Hitler said in 1943. “Other people had no special name.” He was right. Wagner did not invent the main themes of post-Christian culture—follow your bliss, invent your own identity, do your own thing, all you need is love—but he softened us up to accept them in the intimate dimension of music. We continue to emulate him, above all in film. If we find Wagner in the original tedious, it is because the Star Wars series, the Harry Potter films, and a hundred other imitations have corrupted us with Wagner Lite.

Like Caliban, Wagner set out to people this isle with Siegfrieds. He succeeded: Luke Skywalker is the most obvious knockoff, down to the battle with and redemption of the father figure. (Wotan almost says, “Siegfried, I am your grandfather!”) Harry Potter is a younger Skywalker, except that unlike Siegfried, he doesn’t murder Dumbledore. The most popular English novel of the 20th century, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is modeled on the Ring cycle, although Tolkien intended his epic as an antidote to Wagner rather than an imitation.

With the third installment of its new Ring cycle, the Metropolitan Opera has set a high-water mark for opera, featuring director Robert LePage’s theatrical wizardry and a strong cast. LePage devised a 45-ton mechanical set for his Ring cycle, which debuted last September with the first opera of the tetralogy, Das Rheingold. It required extra reinforcement for the Met stage, the most expensive thing the Met has ever undertaken; estimates of the cost of this cycle range up to $40 million. Much as one might wish that the Met had spent that money on Mozart and Verdi, the result is a marvel, despite occasional mechanical glitches including one in a subsequent Siegfried performance. Fortunately the big machine worked flawlessly at the Oct. 27 premiere. The set looks like a row of parallel planks, set at a 30-degree angle to the audience. As the prelude begins, the planks rotate to right angles, and we see the forest floor magnified in three-dimensional projection, with worms and insects crawling over the tree roots; it rotates again and transforms itself into the primeval forest. The Nibelung dwarf Mime takes the infant Siegfried from his dying mother Sieglinde, along with the shards of the sword Nothung. With another rotation, we see Mime’s cavern smithy next to a shimmering pool fed by a small waterfall. The morphing stage and the high-definition projections are magical.

But it is not just LePage’s shape-shifting set that lures us into the enchanted forest; it is Wagner’s music. The rhythm of a tapping anvil grows as if from primal chaos in the timpani and low winds, while a rising figure in the brass—it is the music of the Nibelung hoard—builds to a climax. Under the baton of a James Levine, the longtime Met music director now sidelined by injury, it is chilling; conductor Fabio Luisi made it sound like the Nibelungen waltz, but we will save the bad news for last.

The good news is that the Met offered the strongest cast for Siegfried in many years, headed by Jay Hunter Morris in the title role. The young heroic tenor from Texas can summon the requisite vocal brass when required but has a convincing lyrical side as well. And I cannot recall a Siegfried who looked and acted the part so well. He compares well to the leading interpreters of my lifetime: René Kollo, Siegfried Jerusalem, Jess Thomas, and James King. Opposite Morris was Deborah Voigt, one of the great dramatic sopranos of our time. The Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel sang Wotan beautifully, as he always does. Gerhard Siegel as Mime, Eric Owens as Alberich, and Patricia Bardon as Erda sang and acted wonderfully in their respective roles.

It was good enough to recall the Jewish joke about the old woman who receives a letter from her son containing horrendously awful news. “But does he write beautiful Hebrew,” she sighs. “It’s a pleasure to read.” Wagner’s news is that the West will burn, and murderous thugs like Siegfried will run wild. But the Met presented it so beautifully that it was almost a pleasure to hear.

Mime has raised Siegfried to kill the dragon Fafner, who sits upon the hoard of the Nibelungs, including on a magic ring that can make its owner master of the world. Wotan, the god of laws, had stolen the hoard to pay the giants who built his fortress, Valhalla, and the Nibelungs want it back. But Mime cannot forge the shards of Nothung. The young Siegfried will do so himself and kill Fafner as well as Mime and go on to claim as his bride the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, who lies sleeping on a mountain surrounded by magic fire.

Siegfried will overthrow Wotan with the words, “All my life an old man has stood in my way,” and replace the rule of law with the rule of unrestrained impulse, which Wagner calls love. He and Brünnhilde (who is Wotan’s daughter) shall be the redeemer and redemptrix of the world, replacing the old order of covenants with the new order of do whatever feels right. Everybody dies at the end, but they do so following their bliss.

To understand Wagner’s convulsive impact on the culture, one must hear his work in the theater. We have become accustomed to what he called Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art, through film, which holds us captive and controls our visual and auditory perceptions. Wagner demands that we subject our senses to his control for many hours. (Siegfried begins at 6 p.m. and, with two intermissions, ends near midnight.)

The destruction of the covenantal world by impulsive strength, Wagner’s great theme, also involves an even subtler change in our perception of time. Western classical music subordinates individual events to a musical goal, and our perception of time depends on our progress to that goal. In the hands of the great composers, time itself can be compressed or distended for expressive reasons, but it always remains intact. In the Ring cycle, the thread of time spun by the Nordic fates, or Norns, figuratively breaks to herald the end of the old order. Wagner uses musical sleight-of-hand to evoke the illusion of a break in the continuity of time as well.

Wagner’s music usually is explained through his use of leading motifs, or Leitmotiven, short musical phrases that refer to characters or concepts. (The Wagnerheim website guides the interested listener through each use of these motifs in the cycle.) Darth Vader’s “Dum, dum-dum dumb, dum, dum-dum” and Indiana Jones’ “dee-de-dee-dee, dee-de-dee” are the idiot grandchildren of the Ring. There is something in this procedure of the handworkers’ staging of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which one actor holds up brick and mortar to show that he is playing the Wall, and another holds a lantern and horns to show that he is playing the Moon.

Continue reading: Musical sleight-of-hand

Who wins, who loses? It’s anyone’s guess right now. My instinct is to say this is actually a good thing for Prime Minister Netanyahu: it’s a much more stark step and therefore much easier to oppose than a watered-down, hardly-binding resolution in the General Assembly. It is not, however, what the U.S. was hoping for—it wants no resolutions at all—and is arguably less preferable to the U.S. than a G.A. resolution, in that it forces the U.S. to use its veto. Expect the U.S. now to concentrate on bringing other members of the Security Council onboard, which—again, because it’s a more drastic step—could be easier. Of the 14 other current Security Council members, Germany could almost certainly be brought around, and the U.S.’s fellow veto-wielders Britain and France might be amenable as well. After that, it’s Bosnia and Herzegovina; Brazil; Colombia; Gabon; India; Lebanon; Nigeria; Portugal; and South Africa. Only Colombia, heavily reliant as it is on U.S. support, seems like a possible “no” vote or abstainer. Keep in mind, however, that corralling those extra votes is purely optics and symbolism: even if the 14 other countries support it, the U.S. veto will automatically kill the resolution.

It’s worth recalling that the P.A. is one of only few parties close to the Mideast conflict that wants this. Israel and the U.S. are against. Hamas and Hezbollah are against (they see it as a compromise, as they want all the land). Jordan is against (the Hashemite monarch fears what this means for his substantial Palestinian population). The Palestinian diaspora is wary (they are getting less of a say, and this could arguably lead to the nullification of the right-of-return argument—although it won’t, because the U.S. will veto it).

The upside for Obama could come domestically. You can hit him for letting matters get to this point, but even the staunchest pro-Israel Republican will applaud him for exercising this veto, as they have already applauded him for promising to.

Finally, it’s not clear if this precludes a General Assembly vote: having failed in the Security Council, the Palestinians could then go to that venue, where the numbers and lack of vetos guarantee them a victory. You’ll want to pay attention next week.

Abbas: Palestinians to Seek Full U.N. Membership [Haaretz]
Earlier: Is the P.A. Statehood Drive Good for the P.A.?

Every so often a prominent musician makes a point of sneaking Wagner into a public concert in Israel. Zubin Mehta, the Indian-born conductor of the Israel Philharmonic, played a Wagner excerpt as an encore to a 1981 concert; Daniel Barenboim, conducting a German ensemble, did it again at the 2001 Jerusalem Festival. And in each case public opprobrium put Wagner’s scores back on the shelf. At the Bayreuth concert, some of the Israeli musicians explained that they never would perform Wagner in Israel but felt free to do so elsewhere. Performance of Wagner’s music is unofficially—but effectively—banned in Israel. But should it be? Mark Twain quipped that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. By the same token, banning Wagner’s music is a better idea than it sounds. Suppressing the performance of important musical works is not a small matter, though, and deserves careful thought rather than emotional reflex.

Barenboim is Wagner’s most passionate apostle with an Israeli passport (though the conductor also claims citizenship in “Palestine”). For years Barenboim has linked Israel’s informal ban on Wagner performance to the occupation of the West Bank, which he likens to the Nazi occupation of Europe. In a January 2005 speech at Columbia University titled “Wagner, Israel, and Palestine,” Barenboim excoriated the Zionist impulse that leads Israel to defend itself against cultural as well as military foes, arguing that peace will come only when Israel drops its defenses against both. The speech was a memorial to the late Edward Said, the Palestinian rejectionist who had arranged for Barenboim’s “Palestinian” identity papers. In Barenboim’s view, Israel should embrace the composer who wrote the theme music for the Third Reich, just as it should embrace Arab extremists who learned their anti-Semitism from the grand mufti of Jerusalem’s pro-Hitler wartime broadcasts from Berlin.

The fact that some Israeli Wagnerites are repugnant, though, doesn’t justify banning Wagner’s music. Their politics aside, the Wagnerites have a point: Why shouldn’t a free country allow musicians to play whatever music they like? The “Horst Wessel Song” might be banned, but why exclude the music of a composer who died half a century before Hitler came to power?

Barenboim is arguably the most talented musician of his generation, if not always the canniest interpreter. But as a Wagnerite, he is no Wilhelm Furtwängler, the great mid-century maestro who in 1944 conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin under an enormous swastika on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday: Furtwängler’s live recording of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle remains the definitive interpretation to this day. The excellent Israeli conductor Asher Fisch, Barenboim’s student, told me that he travels with that recording in his iPod. A Wagner specialist, Fisch has conducted “Ring” cycles from Adelaide, Australia, to Seattle, without, of course, having the opportunity to pursue his main career interest at home in Israel.

The case of Richard Wagner is trickier than it seems at first sight. Contrary to the headlines about the Israelis at Bayreuth, Wagner was not “Hitler’s favorite composer.” That dubious honor accords to Wagner’s acolyte Anton Bruckner, the unassuming Austrian church organist who was championed by anti-Semitic parties but who never had much to say about Jews one way or the other. To announce Hitler’s death, German radio played the Adagio from Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, not “Siegfried’s Funeral March.” Zubin Mehta conducted the Israel Philharmonic in Hitler’s favorite piece in 2007 at Lincoln Center without a murmur from the Israeli media. As a Jewish musician, I couldn’t perform it; I can barely stand to listen to it. Hitler loved Wagner, to be sure, but after Stalingrad, he had understandable misgivings about a twilight of the gods—the subject of the concluding opera in Wagner’s four-part “Ring” cycle. Why not prohibit Bruckner as well? And if anti-Semitism is a criterion for performance in Israel, why not ban Tchaikovsky, who hated Jews as much as Wagner did?

Wagner did more than hate Jews, however: He proposed to cast them out of European culture in his infamous 1850 pamphlet “Jewishness in Music,” which denounced the sublime Felix Mendelssohn and the great poet Heinrich Heine as uncreative imitators. His hatred of Jews seems to have had less to do with 19th-century racial theories than with the anxiety of influence. Wagner ripped off the scenario for his opera “The Flying Dutchman” from Heine and knocked off Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” overture in the “Dutchman’s” evocation of the sea. Wagner tried to cover his guilty tracks by denouncing Jewish composers he emulated, including Giacomo Meyerbeer.

Wagner was not just a Jew-hater, then, but a backstabbing self-promoter who defamed the Jewish artists he emulated and who (in Meyerbeer’s case) had advanced his career. He hired Jewish musicians when they served his purposes, for example Hermann Levi, who conducted the premiere of his last opera, “Parsifal.”

Privately, Wagner conceded that Mendelssohn was a genius. At home in Bayreuth, he played four-hand arrangements of Mendelssohn overtures with his wife, Cosima, the daughter of Franz Liszt. Robert Schumann had thrown Liszt out of his Dresden home at an 1848 dinner party after Liszt made disparaging remarks about Mendelssohn. Liszt hated Jews as much as Wagner did, but, unlike his son-in-law, he wasn’t smart enough to steal material from them. His music never became important to the Nazis, in part because it is less compelling than Wagner’s. Cosima lived until 1930, long enough to play den mother to the nascent Nazi movement. She sent care packages to Hitler’s prison cell in 1923 after the Munich beer hall putsch attempt, and she sat her grandchildren on Hitler’s lap. In the midst of so many musical anti-Semites, why single out Wagner?

The deeper problem may lie with Wagner’s Israeli interpreters and defenders. Wagner knew perfectly well that his public disparagement of Jewish musicians was humbug. Not so Daniel Barenboim. In his 2005 Columbia lecture, he said, “Wagner recognized that Jews were separated from society, spoke German with ugly accents and couldn’t speak German music to the German Geist. … Wagner’s acceptance of the fact that the Jews were different from the Germans and [Theodor] Herzl’s recognition of the fact was said with a sense of relief, but both recognized the Jews were a distinct and foreign group in Europe.”

That is manifestly false; during Wagner’s youth, the premier composer and poet in the land of music and poetry both were Jews, and Wagner borrowed liberally from both of them. It would be harder to explain why Barenboim repeated an anti-Semitic caricature that Wagner knew to be false if he had not also repeated an anti-Zionist caricature that Edward Said knew to be false. Barenboim himself apparently believes that these caricatures are true.

No one disputes Wagner’s repulsive beliefs and behavior, and few dispute his importance as a composer. Is it possible “to divide the man from his art,” as conductor Pasternostro told Israeli television in July? The bifurcation seems odd, for art is a mode of human interchange, not an emotionally neutral variety of tonal mathematics. Audiences still pack opera houses to hear Wagner in order to be stirred by the man communicating through his music. Wagner’s attack on the classical form had a broader agenda, in which he linked classical form to the tyranny of convention and the despised biblical God. Classical form focuses the ear on a goal and subordinates all the elements of music to the motion toward this goal. It creates a sense of the future, which makes it possible to evoke suspense, surprise, and humor through musical means. Form is simply a means to create expectations, and without expectations there can be no surprise.

But Wagner was after something more radical: He proposed to do away with the covenantal order of traditional society. Nietzsche had him pegged. At first intoxicated with Wagner, he awoke with a hangover and wrote: “Whence arises all evil in the world, Wagner asked himself? … From customs, laws, morals, institutions, from all those things on which the ancient world and ancient society rests.”

He went on: “Wagner’s heroines, once they have been divested of their heroic husks, are indistinguishable from Madame Bovary.” But Wagner offers more than Emma Bovary with a soundtrack. The provincial French adulteress is a paragon of virtue next to Wagner’s protagonists. In “Die Walküre,” the second installment of his “Ring” cycle (presented last season at the Metropolitan Opera in a brilliant new production by Robert LePage), his lovers are twin siblings. With explicit reference to the legend of Narcissus, they fall in love with the person that they most resemble, namely each other.

If the covenant of marriage is the fundamental unit of covenantal society, Wagner proposed instead a transgressive regime of pure impulse. The purest and least complicated love, in Wagner’s view, is love of self. His contemporaries found this exhilarating and built a cult around the composer.

Wagner was obsessed with overthrowing the Jewish God of Covenants. He did not so much hate Jews as individuals as hate everything the Jewish people represented. “The popes knew well what they were doing when they withdrew the Bible from the Folk,” he wrote. “For the Old Testament in particular, so bound up with the New, might distort the pure idea of Christ to such a point that any nonsense and every deed of violence could claim its sanction. … We must view it as a grave misfortune that Luther had no other weapon of authority against the degenerate Roman Church, than just this Bible.”

That is what made Wagner the defining culture figure of Europe in its decay. In a 1943 dinner-table conversation, Hitler himself observed: “At the beginning of this century there were people called Wagnerians. Other people had no special name.”

Without his music, to be sure, Wagner would have been one more obscure frog in the moral swamp whence the Nazis emerged. But he invented a new musical language to embody the narcissistic impulse. What he accomplished was masterful, turning the tools of classical composition against their original purpose. If Wagner was evil, he was not in any way mediocre. His musical sleight-of-hand involves no more magic than a Penn & Teller show; I showed how some of his musical machinery operates in a 2009 essay for First Things magazine. That is a complex subject and requires careful study, but at bottom Wagner’s musical devices are a special sort of prestidigitation.

Whether Wagner was a premature Nazi or the musical sweetheart of a gang of tone-deaf thugs is beside the point. Wagner mixed the compost heap in which the flowers of the 20th century’s greatest evil took root. The old regime of covenants in which humanity accepts a higher law died out, not only because it had become sclerotic but because it was replaced by an alternative religion that offered the full sensuous experience of personal liberation. The Nazis embraced Wagner not by accident or opportunism but because they recognized in him the cultural trailblazer of the world they set out to rule.

It should not be the business of any state to impose moral criteria on artists; in that case one might ban Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” which Beethoven thought immoral. Music students need to study Wagner. Students of cultural history need to hear Wagner, which means live performances with first-rate singers. The first two installments of the Met “Ring” last season may have set a new world standard for Wagner interpretation and should not be missed by anyone who wants to understand what happened to Western culture.

Art, nonetheless, does not reside in the clouds of Mount Parnassus. It has consequences in the real world in which ordinary humans live and suffer, and society in extreme cases must draw a line. Wagner may not have been the only anti-Semite among the composers of the 19th century, nor even the worst, but he did more than anyone else to mold the culture in which Nazism flourished. The Jewish people have had no enemy more dedicated and more dangerous, precisely because of his enormous talent. In a Jewish state, the public has a right to ask Jewish musicians to be Jews first and musicians second. With reluctance, and in cognizance of all the ambiguities, I think the Israelis are right to silence him.

David P. Goldman is Tablet Magazine’s classical music critic and the Spengler columnist for Asia Times Online.

-Michael Lewis, in his new, excellent travelogue of Germany’s battered economy.

But how is Luxemburg relevant to Jewish history? And what, if anything, would she have to say to Sarah Palin and her Tea Party supporters? The critic and essayist Vivian Gornick joined Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz to discuss these questions in the first installment of Long Story Short, a new monthly podcast about the people, places, and ideas that have shaped Jewish life and history. Each installment will focus on a different subject—from the 17th-century false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi to the 20th century’s princes of punk, the Ramones—and will feature a wide array of thinkers, artists, historians, and intellectuals.

The conversations, leisurely and long, are recorded in Leibovitz’s living room over a bottle of wine and are designed as the antithesis to haste, hype, and the other vulgarities that plague our popular culture. The podcast owes a great debt to the BBC’s long-running show In Our Time, with which it shares the belief that ideas matter, and that rather than be marketed, condensed, tweaked, trivialized, or bowdlerized, they should be passionately discussed. [Running time: 42:27.]

Subscribe to Long Story Short.

Everybody has flowers in their front yard in Sunnyside Gardens, but Otto’s flower arrangements stand out: His garden’s neat choreography rivals that of a North Korean mass performance. Trying to reach the ultimate perfection, Otto, in his mid-70s, is always sweeping, digging, raking, pruning, and polishing things. On hot summer nights he sits on his stoop listening to German folk music on an old cassette recorder, while his Puerto Rican wife, whom I’ll call Maria, watches baseball games in the living room.

Otto never misses an opportunity to tell me how much he aches for Germany. Born and raised in the western state of Nordrhein-Westfalen during the Third Reich, Otto immigrated to the United States in the 1950s because his company relocated. He thought he’d eventually go back, but he met Maria and the couple married. In 1982, they bought a house in Queens.

Our block is perhaps the most diverse one in the world. I am a Protestant born and raised in Germany; my husband is Catholic, from Mexico. We met in 2004, in New York City, and married in 2006. Our neighbors are from Pakistan, India, Great Britain, Peru, Ecuador, Australia, China, Turkey, and Ireland. We are white, pink, beige, brown, and black. Our neighbors are Protestants, Jews, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and Muslims. Most recently, an Orthodox rabbi with his wife and four children moved from Israel to a house on our block to take the pulpit at the Young Israel of Sunnyside congregation, which had been without a rabbi for several years. The synagogue celebrated his arrival with a little parade down our block. Neighbors of all shades and creeds sat on their stoops in the sun; some took pictures and waved at the float that carried the rabbi’s neatly dressed children. In Sunnyside Gardens my husband and I felt at home for the first time in decades. It seemed like a safe and welcoming place.

***

Aside from our nationality, Otto and I have little in common. We both married Latinos, as he once noted, but in addition to an age gap of nearly four decades, we have different tastes in music, clothes, literature, and garden decor. Until recently, Otto left German tabloid magazines on my front porch for me to read, and not wanting to hurt his feelings, I never told him that they went right into the recycling bin. But despite our differences, when Otto asked me to check in on Maria while he traveled to Germany for a trip, I agreed. This may be his last trip home, he said.

Taking care of Maria was far more demanding than I had imagined. I was supposed to drop by once a day and make sure that Maria hadn’t suddenly fallen ill or down the stairs.

“My head is spinning,” she told me on the first morning. “It feels like I have one head on top of the other.” I looked at Maria’s head. I saw nothing wrong. I offered to take her to the doctor, but Maria waved off my offer. “I’ve felt like this for years,” she said.

The next day Maria complained about back pain. “Damn Otto!” she said. “He screwed up my back.” When I asked what happened, she said, “He had a heart attack and fell on top of me.”

Each day Maria complained about something else. She hated hospitals because of the black nurses, and Jews because her sister was married to an allegedly lazy one. She hated the envelope I bought for the “Home Sweet Home” calendar she wanted to send to her sister (presumably the one who married the “lazy Jew”). Maria also hated the milk and the potatoes her Puerto Rican neighbor got her. She even hated Sunnyside. (“Too many trees,” she said.) I was sure that Maria hated me too.

The last few days of Otto’s absence, Maria played possum. I rang the bell but no one opened. Just to make sure everything was OK, I walked past her house at night to check whether the lights came on. They did.

When Otto returned from his vacation, he stopped by my house. “I’m sorry about my wife,” he said. “I think she’s faking it.” There was no way of denying that something was wrong with Maria, so I didn’t.

But what was wrong with Otto that he would be married to Maria? He didn’t strike me as a hater. He, too, had mentioned his lazy Jewish brother-in-law, but added apologetically, “You know there are good Jews and bad Jews.” At least he’s trying to make a distinction, I thought. I decided to let it slide.

***

When my grandfather went to Jerusalem for the first time, in 1968, he was given the grand tour of the city, but after just two hours, he’d had enough. “Take me to see cows,” he said to the guide, or at least that’s the family legend.

I am the inheritor of a strange and somewhat obscure legacy. I come from a long line of Jewish cattle dealers. Our family history has been tied up with cows since at least the 19th century. In fading family photographs, you can see cows as well as ancestors. In my own childhood snapshots, I am smiling, hair cropped and parted, boots high, a calf sucking on my fingers.

I grew up in Hollywood, Florida, an affluent, largely Jewish suburb of Fort Lauderdale. My father still resides for most of the week on the family farm that my grandfather founded in Okeechobee, a two-hour drive away. When I was a child, my father came home one night a week and then again, for weekends, usually a few minutes before the sun set on Friday. Some 4,000 cows live on my family’s farm. There is much to do and the days are always long. But before my father leaves the house each morning in darkness, he makes sure to put on tefillin and say the shacharit prayers. He is, as far as I know, the only full-time Orthodox Jewish farmer in the United States.

Growing up, my friends were the daughters of cardiologists who took their children to Disney World. My summers were spent in the hot Florida sun, milking cows, sorting through tool sheds, cleaning calf cages, chasing after wayward heifers, and seeking the small comforts of air conditioning in my father’s Ford F-150.

****

In Germany, Jewish cattle dealers abounded. Considered the de facto bankers of the countryside, they were particularly targeted by the Nazi propaganda machine. My grandfather, born in 1907, had been groomed to take over the family’s prosperous cattle business, based in Ellingen, a small town in Bavaria, which had branches throughout the region. Then Hitler came to power.

My grandfather escaped in 1938, and, after a few years in Cuba, he found refuge in Miami. When it came time to stake out his American dream, my grandfather turned to what he knew best. Though Bavaria is a long way away from Florida, Holsteins are Holsteins and farmers everywhere speak the same language. When he arrived in Miami, the area surrounding the city was still farm country. With an old pick-up truck, he slowly built a business buying and selling cows throughout the state. Around 1945, he decided to deviate slightly from the family tradition; he began to produce and sell milk, rather than just buy and sell livestock. It was a gradual process, and for a while, he did both simultaneously, establishing his first farm in Miami Springs, where the international airport is now located. “Cattle dealing was in his blood,” my father told me. “He was good at it, he loved it, and he could have made a very good living if he had continued.” But he made an intentional decision to shed his cattle-dealer past, a decision I learned more about when I visited his German hometown last summer.

***

I had been to Germany twice before: as a college student on a research grant, and later, as a journalist covering a conference in Berlin. But my interest in this period was always confined to my maternal side—my grandmother, who was born in Frankfurt, is a survivor of Bergen Belsen. My paternal grandfather, who never spoke about his childhood, died months before I was born and his wife—my grandmother—was a fifth-generation American who knew little of her late husband’s German past. Some photographs survived, and with them, small scraps of information about a small Bavarian town and a once-thriving business, but beyond that, we knew nothing. For the most part, my grandfather, an aloof figure, wiped a clean slate when he stepped onto American soil.

About 15 years ago, my brother went backpacking through Europe and decided to take a detour to Ellingen. There, he met a retired veterinarian named Bruno Buff who had heard of the Berman family from the farmers he worked with in the countryside. Buff also volunteered his time working in the city archives and took an interest in our family. In the years since, the family has stayed in periodic contact with him, mostly through Christmas cards.

But recently, Buff began corresponding more frequently. He told us about a German doctoral student named Stefanie Fischer, who had unearthed archival information about our family and was writing her dissertation on the relationship between Jewish cattle dealers and German farmers. He also sent us a copy of a book about the town’s Jews that had just been published by a ragtag group of amateur historians. He asked: Would we want to come to Ellingen for a visit? After some convincing, my father agreed; this would be his first trip to Germany.

Ellingen is a small, picturesque town just a short train ride from Nuremberg. We arrived from the United States, Israel, and England—more than a dozen in all, from my two-year-old nephew to a 70-year-old cousin who was born in Germany but now refused to speak the language. Ellingen boasted cobblestone streets; flowers spilling out of windowsills; the constant, somewhat maddening din of church bells; and a castle looming at the entrance of the town. Walking through the idyllic streets, I couldn’t help but think that ours was a particularly painful exile; Ellingen in the summertime seems too good to be true.

For most of us, it was our first trip to the town. My aunt was one exception; she had been to Ellingen in the 1980s, and as the story goes, she asked for directions to the Jewish cemetery. When the town’s German-speaking residents drew a blank, she started yelling, “Dead Jews! Dead Jews,” repeatedly at the top of her lungs.

Our arrival in Ellingen was a much talked-about novelty. Before World War II, the town had just a handful of Jewish residents, and now everyone—from the carpenter to the mayor to the innkeeper of a local bed and breakfast—seemed to know the name Berman. Buff, in his 80s, organized the three-day tour for us. He had fought in World War II, and won us all over with his warmth, kindness, and deep-seated regret. It was Buff who introduced us to the entourage of locals who accompanied us along nearly every stop: the retired baker, didn’t speak English, but communicated through strudels, thrusting baked goods our way with smiles; the town’s lawyer and self-appointed historian, who co-authored a book about the town’s Jews, despite what appeared to be no special affinity for Jews; and the makeshift archivist, a middle-aged, unemployed woman with bright orange hair who lived alone with her dog and spent hours sifting through the old papers, documenting the lives of the town’s Jews.

She told me that sometimes she walks the streets of Ellingen and sees the faces of the town’s Jews who have since vanished from its cobblestone pathways.

“They have become my friends,” she said with a sad smile.

***
In the years leading up to World War II, the German countryside was intensely poor. A farmer who wanted to buy cows was dependent on credit that he received from his local cattle dealer, not the bank. My family’s business, Berman-Oppenheimer, emerged as the leading cattle operation in Bavaria in the southeast region of Germany. On any given week, they would send upwards of 150 cows to market, an astronomical number for most German farmers.

“No other group was assaulted so much when the Nazis came to power,” Fischer, the German doctoral student, said of Jewish cattle dealers. “They became synonymous with ripping off farmers.” Nazis mythologized the struggling farmers in the heartland who worked the soil, and pitted them against the relatively well-off Jewish cattle dealers.

German municipalities tried to promote “Judenfrei” cattle markets, but many farmers boycotted them—not because of philo-Semitism, but because “Aryan” prices were deemed too high. For a time, German farmers prohibited the distribution of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer at their cattle auctions because it kept Jewish cattle dealers away.

Soon, Der Stürmer began to publish names of German farmers who continued to do business with Jews, branding them enemies of the state. “Jews had no soil,” Fischer explained. “They didn’t milk cows. They only traded. People looked at Jews as if they didn’t work.” The aging farmers Fischer interviewed for her dissertation told her that it never occurred them that the Jews couldn’t own land. “They saw trading as part of the Jews’ nature,” she said.

***
Walking the streets of Ellingen, our guides pointed to various buildings where Jews had once lived, and to the former synagogue, which is now a private home. The deputy mayor gave us a tour of City Hall and then invited us to show off his elaborate garden and in it, a tiny but ornamented garden shed.

“This comes from Bernard Berman’s house,” he said, pointing to the letters “BB” formed out of the wrought iron that now decorates the shed’s window sills. Bernard is the name of my great-grandfather, but also my own father’s namesake. “My father got it, but I’m not sure how,” he said.

We tried to pry more information out of him, but we didn’t make much headway. “My father bought it after the war,” the deputy mayor repeated several times in his limited English, surprisingly unselfconscious. It angered me; I waited for the deputy mayor to put on a work shirt, take the tools out of his shed, cut through the wrought iron, and return the decoration to its rightful owners—but of course my waiting was for naught. He never offered it, and we didn’t ask. In fact, he never invited us in inside his home.

Later, I asked my father about that moment; wasn’t the decorative piece his rightful inheritance? “I didn’t want it back,” my father replied. “I don’t need anything from him.”

***

One afternoon, we were sitting outside our hotel, enjoying the crisp Bavarian afternoon and sipping German beer in the cool shade when Hermann Seis, the town’s lawyer-turned-historian, came to greet us. My parents had corresponded with him via email, but this was our first meeting with a man who seemed to know more about our family than we did. Seis talked a great deal, but when he took a newspaper article out of his binder and started to pass it around, our large and somewhat unruly crowd sat in rapt attention.

What he passed around was a copy of Der Stürmer, dated December 1937, which none of us had ever seen. There, featured prominently on the front page was an article about my great-grandfather—“the greatest and most cunning of these Ellingen Jews”—who was arrested after he was accused of paying a farmer he worked with to murder a leading Nazi.

The article features three mug shots of my great-grandfather, presumably taken upon his arrest. We sat there, speechless, dumbfounded. My father had heard about an arrest once—not from his father, but from a distant relative who provided no details—but he didn’t know anything beyond that, and certainly not that it was front-page news. No one knew about the article’s existence. (It’s nearly impossible to get a copy of the paper in modern day Germany—wartime propaganda is kept under tight wraps by the country’s anti-Nazi laws—and so researchers need to jump through extensive hoops to prove their interest in the newspaper is purely academic.) To this day, we don’t know how long my great-grandfather sat in jail.

The article is long—more than 2,000 words in the English translation we commissioned—and it is extensive in outlining my great-grandfather’s alleged sins: betraying and displacing farmers, expropriating farms, destroying property, and causing poverty across the countryside. In the article, my great-grandfather is described as a “man of foreign race who corrupted farmers.”

“The Jew is a born criminal,” the article continues. “The strongest laws will not be able to change him.”

Later we learned that my great-grandfather was released soon after and fled with his daughter to London. He died there in 1943, but not before he settled his Ellingen city taxes from exile. If he were to return after the war, my great-grandfather wanted to be sure it would be as a citizen in good standing.

Presumably, my grandfather saw the article on the newsstands in Breslau, where he moved to establish another branch of the family cattle-dealing business in the mid-1930s. But he never mentioned it to his wife, children or grandchildren; we only heard of it for the first time over beer in Ellingen, church bells ringing in the background, from a man who was a stranger.

***
The next afternoon we visited the nearby town of Markt Berolzheim, home to another branch of the family cattle business. Hermann Bauer was our host. He had been mayor of the town for three decades and his father was the town’s leading Nazi politician during the war years. We talked in his garden and drank fresh apple cider. He asked my father how many cows he owned and when my father answered, the mayor blanched.

“That’s four times as many cows as in the whole village,” he said.

My father tried to downplay the success; he tried explaining how for Florida the farm is considered midsized. But it didn’t make much of an impact. Later, when we visited the home that once belonged to my grandfather’s cousins, the man who lived there shared with us a rumor that was floating through the town. “I heard that there is a man named Bill Berman who has more than 2,000 cows,” he whispered, wide-eyed, to my sister. Bill, of course, is my father, and the man’s estimate was off by half. Jews were reviled for their success in the pre-war years and here was my father being forced to return to the same situation; his discomfort—laced with pride, among other things—was palpable.

Before we left, my father took Fischer aside. “Tell the mayor we don’t sell cattle anymore,” he insisted.

Fischer obliged and the mayor nodded, as if in comprehension. But I’m not sure he understood what my father was trying to say. My father, and his father before that, were no longer traders. Family legend has it that until the day he died, my grandfather could look at a cow and remember where and how much he bought her for, even if years had passed. And though trading was clearly his passion, he wanted something else, felt it was essential to become something else. And here in Germany, my father—who has watched each of his five children choose career paths that have taken them away from the family farm—wanted to be sure that the distinction was clear.

Daphna Berman, a former Jerusalem correspondent for Haaretz, is now a senior editor at Moment magazine.

By the late 1930s, things had changed dramatically. Puerto Barrios’ indigenous charms had been all but eradicated, replaced by filth and destitution. It was inhabited mostly by Afro-Guatemalans and West Indians who worked on the docks for pitiful wages; those with means were advised to get out of town as fast as they could.

It is here that we meet Samuel Berkow, the well-to-do German Jewish bachelor at the center of The Price of Escape, a new novel by David Unger. Berkow arrives in Guatemala from Hamburg, where the Nazi noose had begun to tighten around him. Berkow expects his arrival to mark the beginning of a new and exciting life. Instead, in just three days, Puerto Barrios—with its demons, drunks, and thugs—nearly finishes him off.

Unger, a Guatemala-born, Brooklyn-based writer, speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the relationship of Samuel Berkow’s history to his own, about the appeal of creating only semi-sympathetic protagonists, and about why most of his relatives refuse to read his work. [Running time: 15:16].

It is actually surprisingly easy to sympathize with Germans who may, at this point, want the whole thing put finally to rest. But murder will out, as they say, and so will this.

50 Years After Trial, Eichmann Secrets Live On [NYT]
Related: The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: Regrets, He Had a Few

• If it’s Friday, it means post-prayer marches in the Arab world. Anti-government forces are protesting throughout Syria. [AP/WP]

• At the United Nations, President Shimon Peres condemned attempts to achieve Palestinian statehood through the international body and bemoaned the damage already done by the Goldstone Report. [NYT]

• Speaking of which, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice told a congressional hearing, “What we want to see is for it to disappear.” [JTA]

• After a visit from Prime Minister Netanyahu, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned of the urgency of peace talks. [NYT]

• Saad Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister ousted earlier this year by Hezbollah, blamed Iran for its “flagrant intervention” in internal affairs. [AP/WP]

• Meanwhile, former Arab League head Amr Moussa is politicking, likely in an effort to eventually be voted Egypt’s next president. [JPost]

• The peace process failures and the Arab uprisings have hurt the German-Israeli alliance, which, for pretty obvious reasons, has traditionally been unusually strong. [NYT]

• The trial of Alan Gross, the Jewish U.S. contractor charged in Cuba of “acts against the independence and territorial integrity of the state,” is over, a verdict on the way. [JTA]

• Demographically speaking, the happiest man in America should be a tall rich entrepreneurial married Asian-American Jewish senior citizen father who lives in Hawaii. Naturally, the Times found him. [NYT]

• Charlie Sheen: Jew. (Seriously, actually.) [JTA]

“I’ve asked them to be consistent in using the appropriate German names of the camps and this applies also to the Internet,” Zdrojewski said. “At the moment the .pl is misleading and might make people associate the camps with Poland.” Luckily, we now have the Internet to help us correct such faulty notions as a history of murderous Polish anti-Semitism.

Poland Wants Auschwitz Website To Drop .pl Suffix [The Telegraph]

Now a monument directly across the street from the Holocaust memorial has sparked an entirely different conflict. Erected in 2008, it is a memorial to gay victims of the Nazi regime. Echoing the design of Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial, it consists a single cement column, which holds a video monitor playing a continuously looping film of two men kissing. The video has prompted outrage, but not from the parties one might expect. Daniel Estrin reported for Vox Tablet from Berlin. [Running time: 12:00.]

Germany will not fade from the Jewish present, nor, indeed, from the Jewish past. When we try today to picture the world of German Jewry, we are most likely to see the pointlessness of it all through the eyes of Franz Kafka and other Jews who once formed the cutting edge of cultural experimentation. In 2005 the Jewish Museum in New York devoted its main exhibition space to the salons of wealthy Jewish women from the late 18th century through the 1940s and their patronage of early Modernist artists—Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde, and Marcel Proust. The coffee-klatsch and a college education launched the careers of any number of Jewish literary figures, but memories are fading. As a small child I wondered at the writers who stood on my grandparents’ small bookshelf, with magically unpronounceable names—Leon Feuchtwanger, for example, the bestselling novelist of the 1920s whom Hitler dubbed the “number one enemy of the state.” English editions of his novels are hard to scrounge today from used booksellers. The cultural world of German-Jewish assimilation lies moldering in Jewish studies departments.

In truth, there are two stories within the terrible history of Germany and the Jews. One is the story of the German Jews, Europe’s most assimilated community, who contributed to German civic life in vast disproportion to their small numbers. The other story is the meeting of German culture and Jewish religion. This story will never quite fade from Jewish life. Like the medieval Jewish engagement with Greek and Islamic thought, it raises issues that should preoccupy Jewish scholars for generations. It took place far from the glittering salons of the Berlin elite, in yeshiva classrooms and the lodgings of itinerant students. But it continues to have bearing on how Jews might live in the modern world, and its lessons, good as well as bad, will not soon lose importance.

It is still painful for Jews to bring to mind their long encounter with German culture. In the 2009 edition of Yeshiva University’s journal Torah u-Madda, Marc B. Shapiro published a translation of a sermon that the great Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch gave before his synagogue on the hundredth birthday of the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller in 1859. Hirsch lauded Schiller’s compassion and humanitarianism as Torah values, and quoted at length the poet’s “Ode to Joy,” the one Schiller poem Americans might have read, because Beethoven set its opening stanzas in his Ninth Symphony.

Shapiro’s translation bothered some Orthodox bloggers who objected to any kind reference to German culture. Schiller’s youthful Ode, to be sure, offers a soupy appeal to universal brotherhood that sounds better in his sonorous German verse than in the post-mortem of translation. Schiller wrote, for example,

Rancor and revenge be forgotten!
Our mortal enemy be forgiven!
Not one tear should oppress him,
No regret should gnaw at him.

The above strophe shows how much of the difference between German and Yiddish lies in pronunciation; in Yiddish we would say, rather, “Not one tear should oppress him? No regret should gnaw at him?” With due respect to Hirsch, there is some truth to the remonstration that he conceded too much to the universalism of German philosophy. But the give and take between German Jewish Orthodoxy and the poets of German Classicism was richer and subtler than his Schiller sermon might suggest.

By no accident, the outstanding leaders of what would become the main currents of American Judaism all studied at the University of Berlin during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the sage of postwar Modern Orthodoxy, wrote a doctorate in philosophy and mathematics there in 1932. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the leading voice of Conservative Judaism, finished his doctorate (later published as The Prophets) a couple of years later. The Reform scholar Leo Baeck earned his doctorate under the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. The future Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, attended classes for two years in the early 1930s. Franz Rosenzweig, who belonged to no denomination but is read by all, had finished a dissertation (still in print) on Hegel and the state before abandoning academic life to lead a school for Jewish adult education.

Apart from Rosenzweig, none of them were German. Berlin was a magnet for Polish Jews like Schneerson, Heschel, and Baeck, and the Lithuanian Soloveitchik, because German Orthodoxy had created an intellectual world in dialogue with secular culture unlike any other since the time of Maimonides. At the center of this world was Berlin’s Hildesheimer Yeshiva, whose rector in the early 1930s, Yechiel Weinberg, led a Polish congregation before earning a doctorate in Hebrew at the University of Giessen. David Lincoln, rabbi emeritus at New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue, met some of the Hildesheimer faculty after they came to Britain as wartime refugees. “My teacher,” Lincoln recalls, “was a traditional Jew with a long beard and forelocks, utterly strict in observance, but he had done a dissertation on Wordsworth.”

Even Franz Rosenzweig, whose attachment to German identity never faded during his brief life, might be counted as an honorary Ostjud. In 1913 he had decided to convert to Protestant Christianity, like any good Hegelian. But Rosenzweig, raised in a secular home, felt that he should convert to Christianity as a Jew, and for the first time attended Yom Kippur services—as it happened, in a shtiebel with Eastern European Jews. The religious passion of the Polish minyan won him over, and he became a baal tshuvah, a Jew who turns to embrace Orthodox Judaism, rather than a Christian.

Judaism’s encounter with Germany took place far from the salons of the German-Jewish elite. The secular achievements of German Jews still astonish: Fewer than a million of them left a giant imprint on science, art, and industry, not to mention the 1914 war effort. In the 1830s, the foremost musician and the foremost poet in this land of music and poetry were, respectively, Felix Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine—both Christian converts, but prominently identified as Jews. German Jews earned Nobel Prizes in science and Olympic gold medals in saber (after the dueling clubs at German universities excluded them). They built critical sectors of the German economy. Despite his personal anti-Semitism, Kaiser Wilhelm II relied on Walter Rathenau, the Jewish president of General Electric of Germany, and the shipping magnate Albert Ballin, who killed himself when Germany lost World War I. To the extent that German Jews helped build German industry, Hitler was the final beneficiary of their enterprise, and to is hard to suppress the wish that they had done something else.

The story has been told well by Fritz Stern, and Paul Mendes-Flohr and other writers have dissected the German Jews’ tragic identification with their new Fatherland. After World War II, German Jews became the butt of yekke jokes (after the jacket, or Jacke, that they  insisted on wearing even in Israel’s summer heat). “There’s no way Hitler could have lost that war if only he had gotten the Jews on his side,” goes one.

German-Jewish assimilation left little trace. The Reform and Conservative movements are German transplants to America, although in their present form they bear little resemblance to their Teutonic antecedents. The great biblical scholar Solomon Schechter (1847-1915) founded the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1903 as a traditional riposte to Reform Judaism, but his notion of a Jewish law that evolves by national consensus has left a legacy so confused that it is hard to speak of a Conservative Jewish theology. The German roots of Reform Judaism have long since faded.

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• Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to cut his own deal to get Interior Minister Eli Yishai, of Shas, to okay the extension and Defense Minister Barak, of Labor, to okay the approval of certain units after the new freeze would expire. [Ynet]

• A closer look at the implications of Israeli’s planned and approved withdrawal from the Lebanese village of Ghajar, which is near the Golan and occupied primarily by members of the Alawite sect, whose members rule nearby Syria. [NYT]

• The U.S. chairman of the joint chiefs of staffs insisted that Iran policy consists of “dialogue, engagement, and sanctions,” and that military action is in only some distant future, if at all. [JTA]

• There have been allegations that German government policy favors Liberal (i.e., Reform) Judaism over the Orthodox. [NYT]

• Um, the Steven Rosen vs. AIPAC lawsuit … depicted in anime. [Capitol J]

• At left: This is what Leonardo Farkas, the Jewish-Chilean mining tycoon who gave the rescued miners $10,000 each, looks like. He is running for president! [Jewlicious]

• Israel politics may have played role in the disinvitation of a British-Jewish historian from a panel in Belfast. [Arutz Sheva]

• An unprecedented museum exhibition on Hitler, complete with rarely seen (in Germany) images of the Fuhrer, went up in Berlin. [JTA]

• Former Rep. Gary Condit (D-California) has written a book that touches on his affair with Chandra Levy, the 24-year-old intern who was found dead in Rock Creek Park. [CQ Politics]

• Another report on how mah jongg is back. This time with video!

Those conversations led to more travel, including a trip to Leipzig with her grandmother, and they inspired Silver and Ash, a new album that weaves fragments from her family history into deceptively simple, often haunting, indie-folk songs. Burson, who now lives in Brooklyn, invited Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to her apartment to talk about her research, her music (influenced equally by Vienna and Nashville), and the twists of fate that mark her family’s past. She also sings a song. Running time: 23:07.

Not to make light of the whole affair, or Brodsky’s situation, but there is an amusing aspect to his legal troubles. Under the terms of the Polish extradition ruling, the German government—no doubt much to its chagrin—is not permitted to charge Brodsky with anything—like, say, espionage—more serious than forgery. Moreover, the maximum penalty in Germany for forgery is a fine; Brodsky is unlikely to do jail-time even before and during any trial. Moreover, the reason the Polish courts have ruled that Brodsky cannot be tried for anti-German espionage is because spying on Germany isn’t a crime in Poland—which (this is the part I find amusing) actually makes perfect sense if you know your European history.

German Report: ‘Uri Brodsky’ To Avoid Jail [Ynet]
Suspected Mossad Agent Loses Extradition Fight Over Dubai Hit [Haaretz]
Will The Real Uri Brodsky Please Stand Up? [Tikkun Olam]
Earlier: Brodsky To Be Extradited on Lesser Charge
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

• Seeing an opportunity in effective sanctions and technical delays, President Obama is again trying to engage Iran. [WP]

• A Polish court upheld Uri Brodsky’s extradition to Germany. Brodsky, an alleged Mossad agent, is accused of fraudulently procuring a German passport for one of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s assassins. [Haaretz]

• Diplomacy-wise, Israel and Turkey have seen far better days. Economically, they remain strong and important partners for each other. [NYT]

• A sad, panoramic sketch of the shrinking of the Dead Sea. [NYT]

• Reginald Levy, the pilot of the plane hijacked by Black September in 1972, died at 88. He received a hero’s welcome after Israeli commandos (led by Ehud Barak) stormed the plane and rescued the passengers,. [NYT]

Alexander Palloch arrived at the station a bit after 6 p.m. At 20, Palloch had already built a reputation as an unemployed drunk; he’d twice been arrested for distributing extreme right-wing propaganda. He spent much of his free time getting into fistfights.

According to police reports, eyewitnesses later testified that Palloch wasn’t particularly drunk when he approached the 16-year-old—his parents have requested he not be identified, so we’ll call him “Leo”—at the bus station. Still, Palloch was belligerent. “Jewish pig!” he yelled at Leo, and began pounding the stunned boy’s face. Leo struggled and managed to get away. He ran onto Bahnhofstrasse, too fast to notice that Palloch was giving chase. But Palloch was faster: After 30 or 40 meters, he caught up with Leo, knocked him to the ground, and punched him again.

Watching the scene unfold from his car, Mario Traebert, a local resident, slammed the breaks and opened the door. He yelled at Palloch to stop. The bully froze for a second, just long enough for Leo to escape. Traebert opened the passenger door and yelled at Leo to jump in. The bruised boy obliged. Watching his prey speed away, Palloch ran after the car and managed to kick its back door.

The incident could have easily been regarded as just another fight between two teenagers. It could have been filed as just another one in the 150 assaults instigated each year, according to local police records, by young men associated with the extreme right: thugs attacking immigrants, left-wing activists, or homosexuals.

But the words Alexander Palloch chose to shout just before attacking Leo prompted the police to classify the crime as an anti-Semitic attack, a far more infrequent occurrence in Laucha. With very few Jews living in the region, the number of attacks in Saxony-Anhalt usually hovers around one or two per year, though these incidents are treated more seriously than other hate crimes. Indeed, the more one looked into the attack, the more visible were the dark specters of history. As I learned from in-depth conversations with local authorities, activists, and residents, Laucha, which on the surface seemed to be the locus of a successful story of German reunification, was going through a battle for its very soul.

***

As a native-born Israeli who has lived in Germany for three years, I am constantly fascinated by this battle. Whenever a news report offers a glimpse of the old demons thrashing beneath the blanket of postwar German sensitivity and tolerance, I rush to the scene. So as soon as I heard about Leo, I headed to Laucha.

Leo makes a compelling protagonist. His maternal grandfather, Yoseph Lev, survived the Holocaust by hiding in the empty building of the Warsaw ghetto as the rest of his family was hauled off to Auschwitz. His paternal grandfather, Amitzur Shapira, was one of the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered in the terrorist attack during the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Born in Israel, Leo moved to Laucha as a child after his mother, Tzipi Lev, divorced his father and fell in love with a German man, Olaf Osteroth. She was a choreographer specializing in mass gymnastics; he, an avid hot-air balloonist and a notable figure in the world of German aerial sports. They met on an athletes’ exchange program between Israel and Germany, and before too long Tzipi and her two sons were headed to Laucha.

In many ways, the tiny German town wasn’t too dissimilar from their home, Oranit, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank named for the pine trees that surround it. Like Oranit, Laucha was quiet and rural, the sort of place where everybody knew everybody else. And despite their historical baggage, Tzipi and her sons found little in Laucha to make them feel unwelcome. Little, that is, except for the house on 14 Obere Hauptstrasse: Every year on April 20, Adolf Hitler’s birthday, the resident of the second floor of the two-story house would place a small statue of the Führer in the window, along with the Reich’s black, white, and red war flag. Anyone walking by the house on April 20 could also hear loud Nazi-era music booming from within. But everyone assumed it was just an isolated incident, one loose screw in an otherwise orderly town.

***

In 1999, a handful of people from Laucha decided to organize a soccer team known as BCS99. It was conceived as an educational enterprise—the idea was to set up a place for Laucha’s youth to learn the lessons of good sportsmanship—and as such was funded by the municipality, the regional council, the German Football Federation, and a host of local businesses.

The driving force behind the team was Lutz Battke, a chimney-sweep and the resident of the second-floor apartment on 14 Obere Hauptstrasse. Everyone in Laucha knew that Battke was involved with some sort of right-wing politics, but this didn’t seem to trouble any parents, who were happy to have somewhere to send their kids. As far as most parents were concerned, Battke was helping their kids stay out of trouble, turning them into athletes instead of hooligans, teaching them discipline. And if the man who could keep the local kids off the streets and inspire them to invest their hours training rather than drinking or fighting also held a few extremely unkind opinions, so be it. As long as he didn’t act out on these opinions, went the common logic, no damage was done. Tzipi Lev herself subscribed to this logic, sending her oldest son, Leo’s brother, to play for the club. Another player was Alexander Palloch, Leo’s attacker.

From his perch as the club’s coach, Battke devoted a considerable chunk of his time to his other passion, politics. Using the clubhouse as a meeting place, he oversaw the local branch of the National Democratic Party, or NPD, an extreme right-wing party widely considered to be a neo-Nazi organization. A few local politicians objected, but the community at large showed no support for these protests—as far as they were concerned, Battke was an upstanding member of the community and whatever political activity he engaged in was acceptable.

But as time passed, Battke took steps toward gaining real power, and his sporting activity started to merge with his political goals. In 2001, for example, he designed a flag for the football club that—with its black, white, and red palette—suspiciously resembled Nazi iconography. Jana Grandy, Laucha’s then mayor, vowed to boycott the club and tried to stop its public funding. She failed. Two years later, in 2003, Battke formed a political party, which he named after the club, and was elected to local office. In 2007, when Tzipi Lev and Olaf Osteroth brought an Israeli dance group to perform in Laucha, Battke tried, according to local news reports, to recruit a few of the club’s players to march in protest; when the club’s managers told him that was a step too far, he canceled the march. Instead, he printed posters featuring a blood-dripping Star of David and hung them all over town. Again, the local press reported about Battke’s actions, which he explained as being in opposition to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. And again, nobody seemed to care: By 2009, when he was up for re-election as a city councilman, Battke ran as an independent, landing a spot on the NPD ticket, and won more votes than any other candidate.

Alarmed by Battke’s rise, Saxony-Anhalt’s Ministry of Economy tried to suspend Battke from his job as regional chimney sweeper, a position that resembles that of rural volunteer fireman. Battke fought the move in court and won—the NPD, after all, is not outlawed in Germany.

Its legal status aside, however, the NPD still alarms most of Germany’s human rights organizations, who treat the party as dangerous and extremist. When I called the Mobile Beratung für Opfer rechter Gewalt—a nonprofit group that aids victims of right-wing attacks—and expressed an interest in traveling to Laucha, the helpful social worker on the other end of the line went silent. Then she suggested I might need bodyguards, and assigned two of her volunteers to join me and my photographer on our visit to the small town.

As the four of us drove into Laucha, the possibility of violence seemed remote. To the east and the west, vineyards dotted the landscape, and a cheerful sign at the entrance to town toasted the local resident crowned that year’s Wine Queen. The town’s medieval houses and narrow streets sat under a looming church spire, watching sternly over the small square at Laucha’s center.

Leo’s house looks no different than the other stone houses in town. Sitting at the simple dinner table shortly after returning from high school, Leo bore no marks from the attack. His attitude, too, was defiant; even though he had lived in Laucha for most of his life, his accent made him sound more Israeli than German.

“I’m not afraid,” Leo said to me in Hebrew about living in this remote town. “I consider myself also an Israeli, but I can’t see myself living in Israel. My friends are here, my connections are here, I’ve been here from the age of 7. As a Jew, I cannot run or hide. To the contrary, I have a right to live where I want. Precisely because of what happened to my grandparents.”

When asked if he’s angry with the Germans—a question that many of his relatives in Israel raised in the days immediately following the attack—Leo shook his head. But he did feel, he admitted, that what happened to him was brushed off by far too many of his schoolmates as a mere act of bullying. He wished, he said, that people in Laucha would realize the attack was very different from a mere violent outburst.

“My generation is all the time asking not to connect them to the past,” he said. “But if that’s the case then they are supposed to be much more angry than me about this incident. They cannot let that happen. Unless they like to be called Nazis.”

As I was talking to Leo, Frank Rothe, a photographer, left to take some snapshots of Laucha. He shot the pastoral countryside, the ancient municipal plaza, people going about their daily lives. Then, he arrived at the field where Lutz Battke was presiding over soccer practice. Rothe introduced himself to Battke, and Battke told him curtly that no photography was allowed at the club. Rothe replied that since the club was municipal property, he could snap shots whenever he wished. Battke pulled out his battered Nokia cell phone, said a few things to the person on the other end of the line, and handed the phone over to Rothe. Michael Bilstein, the soccer team’s vice president and Laucha’s current mayor, tried to convince Rothe to leave, but Rothe wouldn’t budge. When the conversation finally came to an end, Rothe flipped the cell phone shut. A screen saver came on the phone’s small display. It was a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

***

After hearing Rothe’s account, I wanted to chat with Lutz Battke. He wasn’t at the practice field, so, accompanied by my volunteer bodyguards, I drove to his house and climbed up to the second floor. The shoes Battke had just worn during the football practice were outside the door. I knocked. A woman opened the door, saw my face, and slammed it immediately. I knocked again. There was no answer.

Outside in the street, a young man with short blond hair agreed to answer our questions. He claimed he had never heard of Leo. We told him he was an Israeli-born boy who was beat up by a bully for being a Jew. “Should he even be here?” the young blond asked. “And should you?”

The young man, we later learned from neighbors, was Ronnie, Lutz Battke’s adopted son.

As Battke himself was nowhere to be found, I decided to talk to those residents of Laucha who supported his enterprise. One is Olaf Pleitz, the proprietor of a local company that supplies sanitary appliances and tools for hospitals. Pleitz is one of the key financial sponsors of Battke’s football club. When I called to ask why he was sponsoring a man who had Hitler on his screen saver and goons on his football squad, Pleitz erupted. He shouted that he had the right to sponsor whomever he damn pleased, and that he can’t possibly know what goes on in all of the many organizations he supports.

He was right—as a business owner, he owed no explanation for his actions. That, however, wasn’t the case with Rotkäppchen, a producer of sparkling wine and another enthusiastic sponsor of Battke’s club. The company’s owner, a man with the surname Heise, lives on Tannengartnen Strasse in Laucha, a three-minute ride from Tzipi Lev and Olaf Osteroth’s house and from the practice field where his firm’s sign decorates the fence. When we pulled into his driveway, his wife was leaving the house. We asked her if it was possible talk to Heise, and she said he wasn’t home and asked what we wanted. We said we wanted to know whether Heise could tell us why his firm sponsors a football club that employs a known right-wing extremist as one of its leaders. She took our contacts.

Eight minutes later, Claudia Korenke, one of the firm’s spokespeople, called us from Frankfurt. She talked at length about Herr Heise’s activities to strengthen Germany’s relations with Israel. After I pressed her on the company’s ties to Battke, she promised to get back to me. The next day, she emailed to let me know that Rotkäppchen had decided to cut all ties and sponsorship deals with the club.

I called Alexander Palloch, the bully; his mother said her boy was innocent because he was a Protestant, and therefore forbidden by God from hating foreigners. I called the police to complain about Battke’s Hitler screen saver—based on German laws prohibiting display of Nazi imagery—but the police said that whatever Battke chose to do with his cell phone was his private business. I also called Mayor Bilstein. I wasn’t expecting much; after the attack, Bilstein told local media that there was no evidence that Battke was connected to the attack, and that the children adored him. “[Battke] works with young children, and I do not believe he has bad influence on them,” he said. “We’ve never heard complaints from parents about him. If there were complaints, that would be another story.” But when I finally got him on the phone, the mayor sounded contrite. Leo’s attacker, he said, “comes from a broken home, he escaped from school, and the only guidance he had came from the football club. We can’t allow NPD supporters to coach and teach in this club.” He promised to look into Battke’s politics and vowed that he would resign his position as the club’s vice president if Battke wasn’t removed from his position as coach.

“In 1999, we thought that the club would help to integrate people like Battke into society,” Bilstein told me on the phone. “It is now 2010, and we must admit that we failed. We have succeeded in sports, but everyone is just talking about the Nazi team of Laucha.”

The following day, the Laucha police called again. They told me that they had decided to open an investigation concerning Lutz Battke’s screen saver.

Hearing this bit of news, Lev and Osteroth were happy but not thrilled. They were fighting, they said, for their hometown, a place ravaged by decades of dictatorship before the reunification and years of economic hardship after it. They believed that if people in Laucha had the chance to meet Jewish people, the old animosities would disappear. They also believed that anti-Semitism in Laucha was just a convenient vehicle for material frustrations, not some deep-seated belief. They believed all that, but they weren’t sure. If they turned out to be wrong, they said, they’d pack up and leave, maybe for Israel.

Toward the end of our stay in Laucha, Osteroth took me up in one of his hot-air balloons, and we floated above the region’s green fields. Osteroth said that as long as his family was here, they had to fight. “The role of my generation is not to look back in shame, but to ensure that there will be no closing of the eyes in the present,” he said. He pointed down, toward the center of town. “Otherwise,” he added, “place after place here will become Naziland.”

Ze’ev Avrahami is a writer living in Berlin.

As a veteran Israeli World Cup watcher, I can’t remember any previous international tournament that plunged the people around me into such fanaticism and ecstasy. Even the straitlaced mothers from my son’s kindergarten, who normally don’t even know the meaning of the word “offside” walked around our sleepy neighborhood these past weeks armed with vuvuzelas and draped in Argentinian or Brazilian flags—the more despondent they felt, the more they identified. And in this World Cup, I saw increasing numbers of despondent people who embraced this much-loved, sweaty, and extremely unrefined sport not out of deep affection but out of the profound fear of being stuck with the unpleasant alternative—the world we live in.

World Cup month is always unofficially considered a hiatus from the troubles served up around us, and it’s a hiatus that exists on two levels. The first is the personal level: We are free to avoid thinking about the unbearable July khamsins, the desert winds; our sweaty country’s isolation in the world after the attack on the Turkish flotilla; our foreign minister’s refusal to wipe the beads of sweat from his brow for ideological reasons (khamsins are nothing but an anti-Israel plot with only one purpose—to make us sweat), along with his reassurances that there’s no reason to worry about isolation now because everyone hated us before anyway; that same foreign minister’s fat-cat government, which last week rejected a proposed law to raise the minimum wage and provide a little help for the weakest economic sector of the population; and the depressing reports from the criminal trial of the man who stood at the head of the previous fat-cat government, Ehud Olmert. In short, everything.

The second level is that of reality itself, which also decided to take a short break in honor of the World Cup festivities: The IDF’s latest reports show that the number of attempted terrorist attacks by the Hamas and border clashes with the Palestinians in general has dropped drastically over the last few weeks; another item in the papers told us that the committee investigating the Turkish flotilla incident postponed announcing its conclusions to the day after the World Cup; and it seems that even the murderers and rapists stayed home this last month glued to their TV screens.

Thinking about it on the macro level, the only disadvantage of the World Cup is, in fact, that it ends. Maybe if it could somehow be spread over four full years, so there would be no dead time between one World Cup and the next, we could solve all the world’s problems: The hungry would forget their hunger; the occupiers that they’re occupiers; the oppressed that they’re oppressed. And we could all simply concentrate on staring at that harmless game that, on the face of it, has managed to neutralize all our negative feelings. That idea could easily be translated into a petition, maybe even into a radical political movement, if not for the edifying story of Paul the Octopus.

The octopus that answers to the name of Paul, who lives in an aquarium in the little-known city of Oberhausen, Germany, was first discovered to have remarkable soccer-predictive powers during the 2008 Euro Championship. Before each game, his caretakers placed two transparent plastic containers into his tank, each filled with plump little Paul’s favorite food. The German flag was painted on one of the containers, its opponent’s flag on the other. When Paul chose to open and go into one of the receptacles, he was actually choosing the winning team. At the beginning of the present World Cup, Paul predicted the German team’s progress from one stage to the next (including the surprise loss to Serbia), and, contrary to many commentators, he believed in that young, inexperienced team’s ability to demolish the strong Argentinians. The problems began when the multilimbed prophet rightly predicted that the Germans would lose to the Spanish team. As soon as the game ended with Germany being ousted from the tournament, threats against the life of the poor creature began to appear. Various German blogs started publishing octopus recipes; others called for the oracle to be tossed into a tank of hungry sharks. And so the gifted octopus was instantly transformed from local hero to public enemy No. 1.

The conclusion I draw from Paul’s story is that while it is possible to escape from the violent, ugly reality we have created to a nicer, more innocent one, as long as we remain what we are violence and hatred will always find their way back to the center of things. So, all we actually have to do to make the seemingly impossible connection between the naïve green fields of the World Cup and this paranoid, violent world of ours is to paint the Israeli flag on one of Paul’s food containers and the Palestinian flag on the other, if only to discover once and for all whether that slippery German mollusk is a closet anti-Semite or just another Arab-hater.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

While Israel had hoped the Polish judge would deny Germany’s request for extradition altogether, the ruling was actually not nearly as bad, from Israel’s and Brodsky’s perspectives, as it could have been: It extradites not for the much more serious charge of espionage, but rather for the lesser crime of forgery. Why? Because—unsurprisingly, when you come to think of it—spying on Germany is not a crime in Poland.

Brodsky (which may or may not be his real name) is not suspected to have been directly involved in the assassination. Rather, he stands accused of procuring a fraudulent passport for one of the assassins in the name of Michael Bodenheimer—a real-life Israeli rabbi who, being the American-born son of a pre-World War II German citizen, is entitled to a German passport under German law. Al-Mabhouh buffs will recall that the single German passport used by the assassins was, in fact, a genuine one.

Poland To Extradite Alleged Mossad Agent [JPost]
Alleged Mossad Agent May Appeal Extradition Over Dubai Hit [Haaretz]
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

Hmmm.

In Israel, they’re having no trouble hoping that Germany ends up, well, uber alles. “Israelis support Germany,” the AP reports,

for the same reason fans around the world do: They are one of the competition’s strongest teams, with beautiful footwork, aggressive strikers and a no-nonsense defense.

The passing of time and Germany’s consistent public contrition for the Holocaust has softened many Israelis. And Germany’s strong political support for Israel at a time when the country feels like the target of international hostility makes their soccer team more endearing.

Adds Howard Wolfson, who asks “Is It Okay To Root for Germany?” (and answers that it is), “I’m looking forward to putting history and politics aside for 90 minutes and enjoying a great match. Hopefully that will be ok.”

It will be. Until Sunday, when we’ll be rooting for the Righteous Oranje to put the beatdown on whoever wins today.

Some Israelis OK With Cheering for Germany [AP]
Is It Okay To Root for Germany? [The Goal Post]
Earlier: Going Dutch
Which Squad You Should Root For
Postcard from Berlin

Uruguay and The Netherlands play today at 2:30 E.S.T.; Spain and Germany, last week’s other two victors, play tomorrow. It should be obvious which is Tablet Magazine’s team now:

Hup, Holland, Hup!

Earlier: Which Squad You Should Root For

• Uruguay. Harbored Nazis after the war.

• Ghana. They (in soccer, a side are described with plural verbs) defeated Tablet Magazine’s official team, so by a certain logic they now claim that mantle. Plus, they have John Pantsil, who in the last World Cup waved an Israeli flag after scoring a goal, in honor of his then-team, Hapoel Tel Aviv.

• Argentina. Harbored Nazis.

• Paraguay. Harbored Nazis. Harbors Hamas.

• Netherlands. Compared to most other Western European countries (ahem, France?), they resented Nazi persecution and slaughter of their Jews. Plus, Anne Frank lived there!

• Germany. I mean.

• Spain.

• Brazil. You can’t root for Brazil: That’s like rooting for the Yankees or the Lakers! Plus, they harbored Nazis.

For now, Tablet Magazine is officially supporting the Netherlands, which is playing Brazil, and Ghana, which is playing Uruguay, both on Friday. We’ll revisit the matter after the quarter-finals. Happy watching!

Earlier: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

I am all in favor of reparations for survivors—especially since, scandalously, one in four American ones lives below the poverty line. That said, I found it interesting that Col. Ellis Robinson (Ret.), a longtime Jewish Boca resident and (if I may say so) truly spectacular grandfather, is not also eligible for some Holocaust-based cash. The colonel was not a survivor of the camps; rather, as an officer who landed at Normandy, freed Paris, fought in the Ardennes, and crossed the Rhine at Remagen under General Patton, he helped free them.

So, I asked the colonel: Why isn’t he getting some cash now for his services?

He responded in an email: “Was glad to do it … FREE OF CHARGE.”

Former Nazi Slave Laborers Seek Payment from Germany [South Florida Sun Sentinel]
16,000 Floridians Get a Shot at Holocaust Pensions [UPI/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Foreign Minister Lieberman invited his European counterparts to Gaza. [Ynet]

• The Jewish World Cup will be played Sunday on Randall’s Island, between Manhattan and The Bronx in the East River. The soccer tournament will involve New York-based Jewish players hailing from 15 countries. [JTA]

• Once strong Zionists, the Irish now tend to find themselves in the Palestinians’ corner. Why? [Foreign Policy]

• Ess-A-Pickle, late of the Lower East Side, has officially opened at its new digs in Boro Park, Brooklyn. [Forward]

• Kalmen Opperman, “the elder statesman of the clarinet,” died at 90. [NYT]

I’ve never seen it described this way, but you tell me that the house band at the Mos Eisley Cantina doesn’t sound like some sort of klezmer-jazz fusion.

So now this is back in the news, and with it comes renewed discussion of the assassination’s wisdom (or lack thereof). Israel “now,” writes columnist Yaakov Katz, “has a new crisis to deal with—this time with one of its last two remaining friends in Europe: Poland and Germany.”

And while Melman points to Poland’s efforts to keep the arrest quiet as evidence of its friendship with Israel, he adds,

The fact that this is the first arrest of an Israeli suspected of being a Mossad agent involved in the Dubai assassination indicates that the matter refuses to fade away.

The Dubai hit may have been a success operationally, but it has severely damaged Israel diplomatically. …

The political damage to Israel comes as a series of actions—or lack of actions—indicate that the world is sick of Israel’s deeds and sees Israel as a neighborhood bully that disregards and violates international norms. Israel’s good friends, like Australia, Germany and France are finding it difficult to defend Israel and to justify their support of Israel to their publics.

Of course, as a defender of the assassination might say, Mabhouh could not be reached for comment.

Is Israel Losing Another Ally Because of Dubai Hit? [Haaretz]
Analysis: Was Mabhouh Worth It? [JPost]

Poland To Rule on Suspected Israeli Spy Within a Month [Ynet]
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

The final installment closes with Wildman at the train tracks in Grunewald, the posh neighborhood in western Berlin. On these train tracks, “on Jan. 29, 1943—the day of Valy’s deportation, 1,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, 100 to Theresienstadt. The tracks stretch out into the distance, covered with vegetation in places but still totally visible.”

This picture of the fateful Grunewald track comes from my post from a month ago about my own visit to Berlin.

Paper Love [Slate]
Earlier: Postcards From Berlin

That’s where the fairy tale ends, of course. Ulrich was a Jew in Germany in 1938. After Hitler took power, the idyll gave way to dispassionate ledger-keeping and list-making that categorized that time in history. According to a 1938 inventory of the contents of Ulrich’s apartment, this family had two Persian rugs, 20 neckties, seven purses, two oil paintings, 19 small silver ritual objects, one accordion, one set of skis, 48 linen napkins, 18 hand towels, 42 handkerchiefs, even an ice-cream maker. All markers of middle-class privilege. All markers of a family’s life.

What must Ulrich and Edith—the grandparents of my husband, Jonathan—have thought as Heidelberg changed around them? Starting in 1933, Germany’s Jews lost their government-service and editorial positions. Then they were expelled from the army, saw their citizenship revoked, were prohibited from marrying non-Jews, were banned from public school teaching. Yet relatively few Jews left Germany between 1933 and 1938. They were German. This was their home. The bad times would pass.

One day in 1938, Ulrich’s landlady whispered to him that he had to leave, fast. She’d seen a list on her son’s desk; Ulrich’s name was on it. The landlady’s son was in the SS. Her words convinced Ulrich that it was time to leave the country his family had called home for generations. He procured an invitation to lead High Holiday services at Temple Beth Sholom, a new synagogue in Fredericksburg, Virginia. If he could deliver a sermon in good-enough English, the congregation would hire him as its full-time rabbi. Ulrich’s English was iffy; he studied frantically as Edith packed. They left their home in early September 1938. As a farewell, the shul’s organist played Handel’s “Largo,” as it had at their wedding two years earlier:

Never has there been a shade

of a plant

more dear and lovely,

or more gentle.

Germany confiscated the 42 handkerchiefs, the baby’s chair and potty, the ice cabinet, the fruit plate, the five pans, the four platters, the six metal trays. The inventory notes that the family “acquired for emigration” a fur coat and a gramophone. Those they took with them. Such things, they thought, were needed in America.

A few weeks later, November 9, 1938, was the night of broken glass, Kristallnacht. The city’s synagogues burned. The members of Ulrich’s congregation were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

But not Ulrich and Edith. They lived in Virginia for many years. Ulrich’s English was good enough. It got better. But he didn’t use it to tell his grandchildren any stories of life back in Heidelberg. Ulrich and Edith were always full of secrets, always full of their own kind of brokenness.

Like so many American Jews, they retired to Florida. Jonathan remembers visiting them in their hushed apartment complex when he was a small boy. He self-importantly pushed the elevator button and ran his fingers through their plush carpeting, leaving tracks.

Ulrich and Edith both died in 1973. The baby with whom they left Germany, Jonathan’s uncle, died in 2000. And now Jonathan is reclaiming a sliver of their past: He has decided to become a German citizen. He is working with The German Citizenship Project, which specializes in helping Jewish victims of Nazism and their descendants become re-naturalized in Germany.

It can be tricky to prove that you’re the spawn of a German citizen, what with the unfortunate combination of Germany’s longtime passion for paperwork and the Nazis’ penchant for burning everything in the waning days of the war. And since Germany follows the principle of jus sanguinis, blood law, not every Jew born in Germany actually was a German citizen. The German Citizenship Project is helping Jonathan move the process along—the organization helped around 150 Jews get German citizenship since 2006. (Other Jews, from Israel, the former Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, and the United States have completed the process independently.)

But Jonathan’s not applying alone; he’s applying for our daughters, too. And to my surprise, I am distressed. Not in that old-school, I-would-never-buy-a-Mercedes way: I think today’s Germans have done their fair share of self-examination and breast-beating, and they themselves weren’t the ones wearing the shiny scary boots. My feelings are more ambivalent and sorrowful.

Jonathan wanted our kids to be able to study and work in Europe as European Union passport-holders. I’m happy about that part. No, really. But still, I’m troubled. Maybe the thing that bothers me most is the notion of being the family member left behind. I’m the one apart, the one who’s not in the dominant group. Maybe the thought of them having this identity I won’t have is painful for its symbolism: Children grow up and inevitably go away. It’s hard to imagine when the younger one is still in kindergarten, but I know it’s inevitable.

Another part of my pain has to do not so much with them being German, but with me being an American. This was supposed to be the new Promised Land; American Jews have typically felt about America the way German Jews once felt about Germany. But nowadays, I’m growing increasingly concerned with the state of things. I’m not saying I see barbed wire and stone soap in our own futures; I’m not that kind of hyperbolic drama queen. But I haven’t felt this kind of despair about our country’s direction before. The joy I felt at Barack Obama’s election makes the anxiety I feel now that much more bitter. We have a government seemingly unable to reform health care (I can’t even talk to my friend in England about her adoptive country’s amazing prenatal, midwifery, and newborn care); we have Tea Partiers offering terrifying invective and Republican officials proposing laws that could have chilling effects on civil liberties. We deny science and our role in global warming. It’s not the president I’m freaked out about; it’s everyone else.

Despite the anxiety in the air, at least we can still take pleasure in the small things. Like reality TV: recently, my seven-year-old, Josie, became obsessed with Project Runway, busily sketching dresses and mimicking Heidi Klum’s double-cheek-kiss-punctuated Teutonic sign-off to the evicted designers: “Auf wiedersehen.”

At least if Josie has to leave her country, she’ll be prepared.

A thousand thanks to Michael Fadus for his generous German translation services.

Now look at this cartoon, a poster actually, which is part of a display—called the “Wailing Wall”—in the town square of Cologne, Germany. In case you don’t “get it,” the ostensible point of the cartoon is that Israel is using Gaza—maybe the Gaza blockade? the politics, needless to say, aren’t the most sophisticated in the world—to kill innocent Palestinians. In case you still don’t “ get it,” this is a depiction of the blood libel: the centuries-old anti-Semitic myth that Jews murder and feed on Gentiles (note not just what’s on the plate, but what’s in the glass, too).

The poster has been removed, although the “Wailing Wall” proprietor pledges to try to put it up elsewhere. Meanwhile, however, the public prosecutor has declined to charge the poster-maker under a German law that bans the incitement of racial hatred. “It is not a tendency of hostility toward Jews, but an actual criticism of the situation in Gaza,” he explained of the poster. “The cartoon is a sarcastic expression of the Israeli army in Gaza.”

This puts me in a tricky position. I think cartoons like that should be allowed. Only by allowing a full public airing of atrocious views can we ensure that decent people know about them, condemn their makers, and educate the ignorant. So I don’t want the person who made them to be prosecuted.

However, it’s very, very disturbing that local authorities think that this doesn’t violate their law. It plainly does; it plainly incites anti-Semitism. Believeing that it doesn’t indicates a lack of knowledge about and sensitivity to the history of anti-Semitism that would be troubling anywhere, and is particularly chilling in, well, Germany. And ignorance is a charitable explanation for this lapse.

But this is also a lesson, right? Maybe if anti-Semitism weren’t a crime in Germany, then Germans would be more willing to call people on it!

Cologne Refuses Action Against Artist ‘Blood Libel’ [Jewish Chronicle]

Another report has it that two ex-Fatah security members cooperated with Mossad. These Palestinian men currently work for a company owned by prominent Fatah security official Mohammed Dahlan, who, oh so surprisingly, denies all involvement.

Dubai police say they’re on the verge of announcing definitively, based on cell phone and credit card records, that it was indeed Mossad; for now, they say they are “99 percent” sure. (For the record, Mabhouh could have made it a bit more difficult on his killer: booking his plane over the Internet and telling his family which hotel he was staying at are not ideal things to do if you’re trying to stay alive.)

Even so, the United Arab Emirates—the federation in which Dubai is a member—is requesting active help from the European Union in the investigation, specifically related to the forged European passports the assassins carried. Then again, the single German passport used by an assassin was reported real, which means Germany loses this particular umbrage sweepstakes to Britain, France, and Ireland.

The increasing consensus that it was Mossad has caused the beginnings of diplomatic rifts between Israel and various European countries, particularly those whose passports were faked as part of the plot. Said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner: “The case shows the need for a Palestinian state, immediately.”

Below is the trailer for al-Jazeera’s 30-minute documentary on the spy-thriller element of the plot; for the whole thing, go here.

Oh, and yeah: “There is nothing linking Israel to the assassination of Mabhouh,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Mossad itself remains mum, which is generally how it do.

Meir Dagan: The Mastermind Behind Mossad’s Secret War [Times of London]
Dubai Police: Soon We’ll Have Proof Against Mossad [JPost]
U.A.E. ‘Deeply Concerned’ Over Passports Used in Hamas Leader’s Assassination [LAT]

Earlier: The Great Dubai Murdery Mystery

We’ll begin with the discipline with the least modifiers: concrete poetry is poetry whose appearance has been made integral to meaning; poetry whose typography, not always justified to the left margin, is at least as important to comprehension as word-meaning, rhythm, and rhyme. The best examples are the worst classics from grade-school English: the poem about the word “and” in the shape of an ampersand; the poem about a jug shaped like a jug; the poem about a boy’s blue eyes printed in blue font. I’ve fantasized about writing a positive, even effusive review of a book that would be arranged on the page into the outlines of a toilet or to form the word “NOT!”

Of course, concrete poems also exist in situ, or in nature—they can be found, or discovered, and this process of discovery, the founding poets tell us, is the most moral way “to write.” This process gets at not what can be made, but what is. And so, a stop sign says stop but take that sign off a streetcorner and hang it on a museum wall and the meaning has changed with context. A celebrity’s signature is “an autograph,” and is worth something; its provenance gives value, and its connotative appearance means more than the denotative content of that appearance, which is, after all, only scribbled with pen. These fetishistic concerns come into play particularly on occasions for which traditional verse seems inadequate: the most moving tribute I’ve encountered to the victims of 9/11 was hearing their names read over a loudspeaker on a windy anniversary in downtown Manhattan—doomed name after name without pause, the sheer mass and the mass of their different heritages overwhelming; and it’s glib but accurate to say that Auschwitz, that deathcamp that has “inspired”—a terrible verb—so much of the most inferior poetry of the 20th century, is itself a sort of concrete poem (which is to say: a poem in concrete, and in wood and wire).

CREDIT: round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

But if, as Theodor Adorno maintained, after Auschwitz poetry was immoral (though he later repented of that statement), what were writers of the 1950s to write? Novels that avoided mentioning anything that happened in occupied Poland? Radio dramas of Nazi apologetics? Tens of millions were dead, cities were razed, and German-language literature was somehow corpse and city at once: a corpus first killed, then looted of its vitals, defiled. Also, it didn’t help that many of Germany and Austria’s finest writers were Jews. In the wake of that loss it became apparent that no ideal literature could reconstitute culture because it was just such literary idealism that had collaborated in culture’s destruction: Hitler was a noted memoirist; Goebbels, a literature Ph.D. from Heidelberg, wrote novels and poetry; and good Nazis were supposed to read Goethe between bouts of Jew-killing under the shade of Goethe’s oak tree at Buchenwald.

The 1950s and ’60s avant-garde decided to aid that destruction by destroying the destroyers, and what that meant, especially, was giving them their say—again. By changing context one changed content, as Bäcker and the writers published by neue texte, the name of the journal he edited and publishing house he led (writers comprising the Vienna Group, including Friedrich Achleitner, H.C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener), “wrote” by quotation and juxtaposition. Bäcker called his technique “System nachschrift,” literally the system of writing-after, or after-writing, but a word commonly used to mean “postscript.” His transcript is made only of documents pertaining to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust (other texts, like nachschrift, nachschrift 2, and EPITAPH, occasionally have recourse to visual material). At the same time that Günter Grass was trying to write a future for Germany by repoliticizing the novel, at the same time Peter Handke was denouncing Grass’s outward approach to politics and was instead writing inward, Bäcker invented a terminus for both: the personal and political. His genre, which would be called Dokumentarliteratur (documentary literature), or dokumentarische dichtung (documentary poetry), signaled a formal contribution as original as Thomas Bernhard’s unbreakable paragraphs, but it is as moral contribution that it remains incomparable.

Here the banality of evil becomes the sublimity of a poem; here Bäcker incriminates by verse:

if jews required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is not required to wear the insignia, then they are required to have a separate nameplate on the apartment entrance and the insignia immediately next to it
if persons not required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is required to wear the insignia, then they are entitled to a separate nameplate without the insignia
the affixation of nameplates and insignia is to be completed in such a way that every doubt is eliminated and so that it is clearly evident that

That is a quotation from an announcement “concerning official assignments,” from Vienna’s Jüdischen Nachrichtenblatt of March 3, 1942. Other pages of transcript make more explicit use of concrete, or spatial, properties, such as the excerpts below, which turn the list-poem, that repetitive staple of modern verse, back into the functionally repetitive list, or into something rhetorically between:

auschwitz telephones

no. 18
no. 45
no. 17
no. 33
no. 21

no. 41
no. 76
no. 16
no. 74
no. I
no. F III/2
no. 32
no. 62

no. 315
no. 55

***

7/1 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/3 25 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/4 13 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/5 32 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/6 12 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/7 14 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/8 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/10 22 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/11 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/12 25 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/13 15 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/14 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/15 13 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/18 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/19 29 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/20 30 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/21 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/22 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/23 1 prisoner in hartheim reported as having died
7/24 30 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/25 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/26 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/27 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/28 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/29 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/31 26 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died

Reading this list is arduous but typing it, retyping it for this review, is even worse. If the most moral way to write about the Holocaust is to quote it, perhaps the most moral way to read about it is to copy the quotations, and so Bäcker, like Victor Klemperer, author of The Language of the Third Reich, and like America’s Charles Reznikoff, who performed a similar palimpsest of testimony with Holocaust, might be best understood as a reader who wrote. In my own reading-writing of this passage, I had the following thoughts: do the days skipped, such as July 2 and July 9, represent Sundays, or other “days-off,” and what did the executioners do then? Also, why was only one prisoner executed on the 23rd, and who was that singular man? He had a name, certainly, and perhaps a family, etc. This type of questioning leads to the type of writing Bäcker sought to avoid—we ask, and because the dead are dead we can only, but barely, imagine the answers. Only if we flip to the back of the book, because Bäcker never clutters the pages of his poem with notes, do we find some brief jot—a true postscript—that this list of Hartheim prisoners was obtained from prosecutorial documents in the possession of the state attorney in Linz, dated 1948.

Casual appreciations of Bäcker’s achievement often forgo the terror while embracing technique: certainly there are a number of websites that compare the quotation method—“appropriation”—to the Web itself, and discourse on the ease with which writers today can ape postmodernity with just a click of the mouse, copying ‘n’ pasting “poems,” or arranging Google results into verse. From the pecia system of the Middle Ages, which broke manuscripts into sections, or peciæ, assigning each to a different scribe, to the highlight and drag I’ve used to rearrange the very sentence you’re reading now, we’ve lately arrived in the time of the home use version, the no-muss, no-fuss version, of monkish copying; in which one makes a text one’s own not through holy transcription but by impulsive download. Bäcker was no mere technician, however, and his almost religious transcription was necessary for reasons of renewal: not so much literary as of the soul. Bäcker, born 1925, dead in 2003, was active in the press and photography office of the Linz Hitlerjugend, serving ultimately as a cadre unit leader (Gefolgschaftsführer), and joined the Nazi Party as soon as he turned 18. He spent the rest of his life atoning for this, forcing himself to read his moral failure into every sentence he quoted, into every word he excised from primary sources as if they were his own, his primary, flesh.

For its part, three Israelis will compete: downhill skier Mikail Renzhin, and Alexandra and Roman Zaretsky, a brother-and-sister ice-dancing team. Faster, higher, stronger!

Vancouver Jews Gearing Up for the Games [JTA]
Israel in Olympics To Win, or Not At All [JTA]

]

Haaretz points to Bronislaw Hajda as one such non-German. An 85-year-old Polish-American who resides in Chicago, Hajda allegedly served at Treblinka in 1944. Though he “without doubt” committed war crimes, a U.S. court found, he cannot be tried under U.S. jurisdiction. Instead, he awaits deportation to Poland or Germany—a prospect that the prosecution of John Demjanjuk has made, for him and for any others in his position, suddenly much more threatening.

Update: While Haaretz says Hadja is still alive, a reader pointed us to the Chicago Tribune, which reported he died in 2005, and the Social Security Death Index, which reports him as deceased.

Demjanjuk Case Could Set Precedent in Germany [Haaretz]

Now, Germany has belatedly restored her record, acknowledging it as an “act of justice and a symbolic gesture” that “can in no way make up” for what happened. Lambert responded: “That’s very nice and I appreciate it. I couldn’t repeat the jump today. Believe me.”

Germans Restore 1936 High Jump Record [AP]

Broder—whose 2006 book, Hurra, Wir Kapitulieren (Hurray! We’re Capitulating!), posited that the world is handing itself over to dangerous Islamist powers—even says he would focus on relations with those Muslim communities in Germany that “step in for strict separation of religion and state and a secular society.”

While Haaretz feels certain Broder has little chance of winning the presidency, he does have one slight demographic edge: at 63, he is closer to the increasing German Jewish population of Soviet immigrants and their children and than to “the Holocaust generation” that has held power in the community. And, at the very least, says the paper, his announcement has made a splash: “The council is outraged, the lay Jewish community amused and a new debate about German-Jewish relations has been sparked—just how Broder likes it.”

The German Shepherd: Is Germany Ready for a Provocative Jewish Leader? [Haaretz]